File storage on RO Pi

Having had more time to play with the Pi tonight, I’ve become curious as to how other RISC OS Pi users are storing their files?

I’m a bit wary about saving stuff on the SD card (although RISC OS 5.19 and SDFS seem very stable so far). I guess my mindset has always been that SD cards are for digital cameras and transferring data between computers, not for everyday use, so actually using one as a boot/storage disc is a bit disconcerting.

I have set up an NFS share on my iMac and access it from RISC OS using Sunfish; in the first instance this will be for sharing files between the machines, but as I use the Pi more, I’m pondering if I should keep anything “important” on the Mac rather than on the SD card.

I’d be interested to hear what people are doing. I’ve seen several mentions of NAS devices on the forums; that’s an option I’ve looked at in the past and discounted, but may reconsider.

In my RPi-Case I have a ADFS-HD (250GB). The card is only for booting and I have a second one.

Pi – I use the SD card.
Beagle – I boot off SD, but the mounted filesystem is a 1GiB FileCore format USB stick.

I have nothing on either system that isn’t copied elsewhere. Restoring a messed-up filesystem would be annoying, but not impossible. When I buy a new USB harddisc, I might try to image both to make restoration less hassle.

If the Pi (etc) is your primary machine, just back up stuff regularly.

For RISC OS use I repurposed an old 320Gb USB disc that used to be a primary OSX backup sink. I pretty much use it as a place for the backups to though since the SD is so much faster.
I also use Omni to talk to a mac mini as a transfer machine – but NFS & Sunfish might be better. How is it working for you?
NAS has the disadvantage of going via USB and a slowish ethernet connection – unless you can find one that allows both usb and ethernet connections?

Something that has occurred to me as a possible Good Thing is an SSD designed for older machines – where IDE and no OS support for TRIM is present. They at least claim to deal with it on their own. It would (possibly) work for me because my Pi is in an old newertechnology mac-mini extension case with a USB hub and IDE interface already built in.

They are a touch expensive but might be worth it – http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Legacy_Pro
A 60G for $140 seems a lot but if it does the job…

Tim, I couldn’t get LanManFS to talk to my iMac at all. I believe OS X 10.7 or 10.8 has a new SMB server which RISC OS doesn’t like. NFS was a bit of a faff (technical term) to set up on the Mac but is now working very well.

I think I will stick with a strategy of regular backups. I have noticed 7backup installed in the Utilities directory, so will investigate using that.

I hear you Robert; my mac mini is an old PPC unit so running 10.6 which seems to have no problems with LanManFS. Can’t talk to my iMac/10.8 at all. I tried an “add Samba back to your Mac” package but although the pi can ‘see’ the shares it can’t attach to them. Sigh.

Is there a RISC OS SMB server app? Haven’t noticed one, but y’never know.

…RISC OS SMB server app…

Look here GAG and try the BeagleBoard one. I think it works.

Robert, just how did you make Sunfish talk NFS to your iMac? I’ve lost an entire morning trying to make it work!
My/etc/exports file has one line -
/Users/tim 192.168.1.42(rw,insecure)

show mount -e shows
/Users/tim 192.168.1.42(rw,insecure)
– so it looks like I got nfsd started up correctly

If found my UID & GID with
id -u “tim”
& id -g “tim”
and put them in the Sunfish ‘User id choices’.

All I get is an error claiming ‘NFS call failed(Permission denied)’ which is about as helpful an error as I’ve come to expect over the years.

What did you do to make it work?

My exports file seems to be of a slightly different: format:

/Users/robert/riscos -network 192.168.0.0 -mask 255.255.255.0

Then I found my UID and GID as you did, and it all seems to work. I don’t profess to being a networking expert at all. I found the format of the exports file online somewhere, but I don’t have the URL to hand at the moment.

Ah. Well I tried that format too after delving through altogether too many supposedly helpful web-pages. I even tried mounting from my other Mac to see if it was a general issue or restricted to RISC OS; it was general.

Eventually I gave up and download NFSManager from Bresink (http://www.bresink.com/osx/NFSManager.html) which made it work in about 30 seconds. Sigh. My exports file is now showing as
/Users/tim Everyone
and some other stuff must have been fixed up but I can’t for the life of me find it.

Now it works brilliantly well, seem much faster than the Omni/SMB connection and shows all the files in the directory rather than a seemingly random selection.

I will try and find my notes of the exact steps I took on both OS X and RISC OS, and post them online somewhere.